"Desperately
trying
to say something
complex, it only manages to look as if it said
something that mattered."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A somber, dark moody film that is both a family
drama and a
hit man
movie--take your pick. Writer-director James Gray is
the 25-year-old in
his feature film debut, whose sluggish spare film is
not without some
cheap
violent thrills and penetrating atmospheric scenes. It
tries its hand
at
offering an American tragedy built around a
dysfunctional Russian
Jewish
emigre family living in the Brighton Beach section of
Brooklyn, where
the
despondent heavy-handed abusive father Arkady Shapira
(Maximilian
Schell)
is resigned to the fact that he's an educated man
reduced to running a
newsstand because he's economically strapped and
having raised two
troubled
sons, a twentysomething son he hates named Joshua (Tim
Roth ), a
hardened
hit man for the Russian mob, and his teenage son he
still holds out
some
hope for named Reuben (Edward Furlong), a high school
truant who
idolizes
his older brother. Arkady's wife Irina (Vanessa
Redgrave) is on her
death
bed with a brain tumor, who gets a chance to showoff
her Russian accent
when she meets with her two sons before her demise.
Also living with
the
family is the 80-year-old grandma (Mina Bern).

Joshua is displeased to learn his boss orders him
back to
his childhood
haunts to rub out an Iranian jeweler. The hit man was
exiled by his
father
when he learned how his son earns a living. Trying to
be discreet in
his
return home, nevertheless Joshua is spotted by one of
his kid brother's
acquaintances and meets with the affable Reuben. Also
getting in touch
with Joshua is the 22-year-old Alla (Moira Kelly), his
former
girlfriend
he left behind when he split for Manhattan. The two
pick up where they
left off, though Joshua is not the peppy type and
their romance is as
heavy
going as the rest of the film.

The film tries to make Joshua a tragic figure, a
cold-blooded killer
who is capable of loving his mom, brother and
girlfriend, who even if
he's
a bad dude he still has some human feelings; but that
attempt never
passes
muster except as something old lifted from the world
of film noir. That
Tim Roth makes his character compelling, speaks
volumes of his enormous
talent. Furlong also excels as an innocent we can feel
sorry for, who
keeps
showing up in the wrong place.

There's an awkward closing scene in which a furnace
is used
to cremate
an innocent boy who died in the streets of Brighton
Beach, which is a
horrible
reminder of the Holocaust. The only thing is that this
film didn't earn
the right to go there. Desperately trying to say
something complex, it
only manages to look as if it said something that
mattered.